Besides the whole blogging thing, we've used RSS feeds for product data transfer, and on our question/answer site http://www.funadvice.com, members can use RSS to see when they get replies to their questions.
We've used RSS as a means to distribute various kinds of reports, server log summaries, and a host of other things. Its great using something like NetNewsWire and in the morning seeing the latest backup record out of the servers, just a well as new posts on the site. We've written Ruby scripts to generate RSS files showing traffic over the course of the day and other goodies.
I think RSS & Atom has been pigeon-holed to a certain extent.
Even though I don't use Eudora, I use Thunderbird on OS X day in and day out. It beats Mail.app in many many ways, not the least of which its almost the one mail client on the platform where you can order your messages by read status, thus floating all of them at the top.
If Eudora can help smooth out some of the features and squash some more bugs in Thunderbird that's clearly a win for everyone.
Being vegan is a total choice, but is not a luxury. Less health problems, cheaper and healther food. Here's the thing. A proper vegan diet does not have to include things like Tofu or other meat "substitutes". Adding meat and dairy to the diet is actually more expensive!
Being vegan is an educated choice where you tune your body and make up for the deficiencies that not having meat bring (vitamin b12 -- available in other non-meat sources and various oils.). Because its a choice, you know that in the hypothetical situation where you would not get any vegetables (in the artic circle as an example), then you would be forced to eat meat, which is fine, but then, you can continue your vegan existence afterwards./rant off
Sorry for the rant, just tired of people equating veganism with "tree huggers", "the leftist fringe", or "dirty hippies" without educating themselves.
Bummer that you just shat all over being vegan for no good reason.
Sure, I agree that if it comes down to starving,then I, a vegan, would eat Bambi and her kids (and carve up her mate's antlers to make a spear) without a moments thought.
However, in the USA, there's an overabundance of food, both good and bad. I have a choice, and I use it by being vegan, without shitting over all my near and dear Bamb-eaters (wife, family, etc) for no good reason.
Similarly, with a good choice of distributed software available (and a wide variety of networking libraries, compilers and scripting languages as well), if I were the makers of the software, and I felt like putting restrictions on the use for whatever "moral" reasons I liked, then that's my perogative too.
Lets face it, we live in an abundant society (here in the west), and so we can make at least a few more choices about certain things that we have control of. We even have the choice to not use their software. Last time I looked, it was still a free country!
Nutrition issues are HUGE here in the United States. Children are getting diabetes decades earlier solely based on poor nutrition choices by their parents, and many here are saying to let children eat what they want. As a dad, I say, crap to that.
My daughter can eat what she wants when she gets past 18. For now, no sodas, reduced trans-fats, tons of fruits and vegetables, and good meats. That's the rule in my home, and I'm sticking by it.
Not monitoring what your kids eat is in my opinion, really bad parenting, and attracting trouble. If you can use a tool to help when you're not away, its not big brother, or big mamma, it's common sense.
Look over the perl 6 syntax and the increased punctuation, then compare to Ruby. I've been working with perl now for about 10 years or more, and Ruby has replaced or supplanted all my Perl work over the last several months. No going back. Not even bothering to learn Perl 6. CPAN is sweet, but so much is already built into ruby's standard libs.
Ruby syntax is clean. Real OOP. Self documenting. No way I'm going back, especially not for Perl 6, which is too much, and too late.
As a New Yorker, I started out reading mostly the New York Times. However Wapo has consistently led in innovations in the industry. Coupled with their world class journalism, blogs, all kinds of reader feedback, and most importantly -- leaving the content free, has let me to turn to them as must read on my long list of news sources each morning.
The NY Times has walled off their editorial and I have seen my interest in the paper slowly wane.
That's a horrendously terrible reason to oppose it, and also shortsighted.
Its very frustrating listening to both sides when the solution is really simple:
1. Run big pipes to every home/office 2. Cap usage (not bandwidth) daily. 3. Charge users who use more (like your cellphone)
I work from home/office and need a fat pipe with big upload. Joe suburban kid wants to peer-to-peer stuff. No problem. When the traffic reaches the cap, either suspend service, or charge more for the extra traffic -- according to pre-existing arrangements. (Remember your cellphone business model?????)
I do the same for hosting now and the hosting providers seem to be happy with what they make from me. I would get the burstable traffic that I want so I can download a distro, or other large files occassionally at great speeds. Joe suburban kid can download the media that he wants from Youtube, and the ISP's can get into the business of providing all the content that they want as well.
What's wrong with that? It's capitalism, they can build out all the capacity that they want, and pass the buck onto the consumers.
But no, that's too simple for everyone to understand... What they want, is to build the big pipes and use it for their own traffic to us. Exclusively. Except that's not the way how the internet works. We want to watch Youtube or listen to iTunes or download the latest viral Lazy Sunday. They want to give us Verizon channel 5. Sure, give us Verizon channel 5, if its any good, we will watch it.
I only wish network neutrality advocates could stick to the simple position outlined above. It works for everyone. The ISP's content providers, and the consumers.
For people NOT having a vonage account and who never used vonage, this makes no sense, and they should probably be wary of phishing scam.
However, for people like myself using vonage for 2+ years now, it immediately makes sense. I registered and am now waiting for the time when I can buy my shiny new stock certificates.
Considering that the email NEVER went to the people who DO NOT use vonage, well... the aluminum foil is just seeping into your crania right about now and polluting your otherwise smoothly functioning thought process.
And I don't say that lightly. My company has 7 programmers and 2 developers. The 2 developers get 5x more done that the 7 programmers. Those developers not only program, but deal with end users, help document stuff, have a huge hand in designing the application, and understanding the business processes behind why an application is needed in the first place.
Programmers do algorithms, developers put something in the hands of the end-user to actually use, have fun, and make money with.
Now, most universities abroad are filled with programmers that are dying to get a job in the next Microsoft, HP, or Intel campus that opens up in their country, to sit back in a cubicle and code algos for the forseeable future. And there's a place for that, but for the money, I prefer the all-round developer any day.
After using prototype.js for a while now, its hard to switch to a fatter library which is what the Yahoo library seems like. Each one has their good points, and pieces missing, but I think if you decide to use either, you can't go wrong.
There are some good snippets in there though, and Yahoo has done a good job of introducing code and web services to the developer community, much much more that Google has.
The design patterns are a very very good thing to expose. Although many of us might have been using similar standards, it sort of brings a number of them under one umbrella and into one place.
Computers transformed the world, not so much cell phones.
This just shows how far BillyG is gone off base as far as computing is concerned. He no longer thinks that having a general purpose computer is good for that part of the world.
Think how much your life as changed because of the the general purpose computer. Now think how much your life has changed because of the cell phone. Compare the two. Compare the two again, carefully.
With general purpose computers, people can produce stuff, with cell phones, they consume stuff. Its as simple as that. Which is why the Negroponte effort is so important. Because it will enable people to write programs (yes, even programs for cellphone), or a letter, or setup a database, or do spreadsheets, or help start and run their fledgling businesses. Keep credit records, get decent weather reports, create and consume rich media. The possibilities are endless with a general purpose computer.
We've become used to outrage with all that's happening in the world today -- no matter which side of the spectrum you are in, but BillyG's proposal brings to the fore a new level of outrage in me that I have not felt in a long time.
Just use the excellent prototype javascript library instead. Saves a ton of time. It's cross platform, dev language agnostic, and has super sweet functionality built in.
I guess you can use JSON, and XML data formats with prototype, but I just use plain old text to accomplish whatever I want.
Prototype is also used in Ruby on Rails and its PHP analogue CAKE, and also the excellent perl framework Catalyst
After reading the article, it seems that a they did not think out a really scalable platform to run their services and apps. So over time, it became a huge mashup of servers and services. Heck, they can't even properly map the production environment to a small development set.
Compared to Google clusters, they seem to be light years behind. As a software developer, I can tell you that the key to rolling out applications quickly, is to have a decent framework in place. Whatever that framework might be (from shell scripts to java monstrosities), once its in place, developing apps on top of it are easy. Similarly a well thought out app execution environment is golden.
If you ever check out Google's MapReduce, you'll see what I mean. It's just so well thought out and so elegant, that its easy to believe that they can scale outwards forever. You'd not be too far off if you thought that Microsoft were rethinking their whole production environment to compete with Google.
There's no way that Microsoft can quickly and easily roll out vast new applications that scale, because that whole clustering framework is completely opposite to what Windows provides.
I went to the movie without any pre-conceptions and without knowing anything about AeonFlux. I've not read the comics, or anything.
I was wary going in because of bad reviews, but the movie was surprisingly, evenly good. There was a good story, and the acting was fair. Here's the main difference between AeonFlux and the Matrix, in my opionion:
Both movies start off with jaw dropping premises. AeonFlux actually carries the premise through to the end in a satisfactory conclusion.
As long as you have broadcast TV, Cable and Satellite, (all tv on the producer's schedule), then you'll need a box like Tivo to timeshift and commercial skip. Sure, Tivo is getting ready for the future, and they're in a good place (so long as they prepare a new box with high speed connections and streaming capability). But to say that Tivo's dead is just a little shortsighted.
Consumers are in two camps. Passive and Active. We're active consumers of media so its no big deal for us, but Joe six loves what Tivo and his sisters do for him. Enough six packs (about 90%) don't have PVR's and just passively consume media. This is where content producers shift eyeballs to advertisers. And the way how they get paid to produce content too. There too much politics, jobs, infrastructure and inertia piled up for an overnight shift.
Right now there ain't enough of us actives out there to pay enough for production of our favourite content by subscriptions. Believe me, I want everything that the first poster said too, but at least I am realistic in the short term.
Windows users would sign up for droves for something like Apple's.Mac, this would have been a great way for Microsoft to get more revenue stream, offer backup services, personal home pages, file exchange, groups, and what not. Sure, Windows is crappy enough already, but a service like that, for Windows would have been a great thing. I'm sure Google will introduce it soon enough anyway.
Instead, they're in full reaction mode to Google with this really crappy site that seems to get the worst features of the web assembled all in one place.
Man, these guys have lost the ability to innovate Big Time (tm). I don't use Windows, but we all can see the opportunity that they missed here.
My eyes gravitate towards whatever article/information I'm reading and completely ignores the peripheral ads. Once in a while, I see something that I like, and if I do, I click on it.
Many slashdotters think its really kewl to block ads, but ads pay for the sites you are viewing, ads pay for slashdot (not nearly enough of us subscribe to keep this site running).
On the other hand, we do have the right to block ads, its our computer and bandwidth. But if enough of us do, then most of the sites we know and love will cease to operate. As someone working in the ad-serving and tracking industry, ad blockers (not popup blockers -- popups are evil) are beginning to show up as a serious chunk in the stats. Advertisers and their agencies are now up in arms. Not being able to tell the ROI of an ad, means agencies can't tell if its worth showing or now.
By us not clicking on the crappy flash ads -- that sends a message. Blocking it does not.
Slashdot Mirror
We're missing the point!
All my programs with divide by zero errors will now work!
Besides the whole blogging thing, we've used RSS feeds for product data transfer, and on our question/answer site http://www.funadvice.com, members can use RSS to see when they get replies to their questions.
We've used RSS as a means to distribute various kinds of reports, server log summaries, and a host of other things. Its great using something like NetNewsWire and in the morning seeing the latest backup record out of the servers, just a well as new posts on the site. We've written Ruby scripts to generate RSS files showing traffic over the course of the day and other goodies.
I think RSS & Atom has been pigeon-holed to a certain extent.
Even though I don't use Eudora, I use Thunderbird on OS X day in and day out. It beats Mail.app in many many ways, not the least of which its almost the one mail client on the platform where you can order your messages by read status, thus floating all of them at the top. If Eudora can help smooth out some of the features and squash some more bugs in Thunderbird that's clearly a win for everyone.
Lots of people dismiss this product, but the kicker for me is that its priced so I can put one in each room with a TV, instead of a PC beside each TV.
Imagine watching Youtube on your bigscreen... (on the other hand, with that crappy video, perhaps not).
rant on/
/rant off
Being vegan is a total choice, but is not a luxury. Less health problems, cheaper and healther food. Here's the thing. A proper vegan diet does not have to include things like Tofu or other meat "substitutes". Adding meat and dairy to the diet is actually more expensive!
Being vegan is an educated choice where you tune your body and make up for the deficiencies that not having meat bring (vitamin b12 -- available in other non-meat sources and various oils.). Because its a choice, you know that in the hypothetical situation where you would not get any vegetables (in the artic circle as an example), then you would be forced to eat meat, which is fine, but then, you can continue your vegan existence afterwards.
Sorry for the rant, just tired of people equating veganism with "tree huggers", "the leftist fringe", or "dirty hippies" without educating themselves.
Bummer that you just shat all over being vegan for no good reason.
Sure, I agree that if it comes down to starving,then I, a vegan, would eat Bambi and her kids (and carve up her mate's antlers to make a spear) without a moments thought.
However, in the USA, there's an overabundance of food, both good and bad. I have a choice, and I use it by being vegan, without shitting over all my near and dear Bamb-eaters (wife, family, etc) for no good reason.
Similarly, with a good choice of distributed software available (and a wide variety of networking libraries, compilers and scripting languages as well), if I were the makers of the software, and I felt like putting restrictions on the use for whatever "moral" reasons I liked, then that's my perogative too.
Lets face it, we live in an abundant society (here in the west), and so we can make at least a few more choices about certain things that we have control of. We even have the choice to not use their software. Last time I looked, it was still a free country!
Just like PHP, right?
Nutrition issues are HUGE here in the United States. Children are getting diabetes decades earlier solely based on poor nutrition choices by their parents, and many here are saying to let children eat what they want. As a dad, I say, crap to that.
My daughter can eat what she wants when she gets past 18. For now, no sodas, reduced trans-fats, tons of fruits and vegetables, and good meats. That's the rule in my home, and I'm sticking by it.
Not monitoring what your kids eat is in my opinion, really bad parenting, and attracting trouble. If you can use a tool to help when you're not away, its not big brother, or big mamma, it's common sense.
Look over the perl 6 syntax and the increased punctuation, then compare to Ruby. I've been working with perl now for about 10 years or more, and Ruby has replaced or supplanted all my Perl work over the last several months. No going back. Not even bothering to learn Perl 6. CPAN is sweet, but so much is already built into ruby's standard libs.
Ruby syntax is clean. Real OOP. Self documenting. No way I'm going back, especially not for Perl 6, which is too much, and too late.
As a New Yorker, I started out reading mostly the New York Times. However Wapo has consistently led in innovations in the industry. Coupled with their world class journalism, blogs, all kinds of reader feedback, and most importantly -- leaving the content free, has let me to turn to them as must read on my long list of news sources each morning.
The NY Times has walled off their editorial and I have seen my interest in the paper slowly wane.
Happy 10 years Wapo!
* that doesn't want the crap politics that happens every day in corp america
* who genuinely thinks customers come first
* that wants nothing to do with the power plays in the industry (their power play is right there with their loyal customers!)
* dont want venture caps knocking on their door
* who hates the idea that facebook wants 2 Billion for less traffic and prestige than their site
* who feels that their size is good and right for them, not for wall street.
* whose leaders and owners can sleep without worries at night
Have you ever listened to Craig in an interview? Do so, and you'll find 10 more reasons than I cited, easy.
That's a horrendously terrible reason to oppose it, and also shortsighted.
Its very frustrating listening to both sides when the solution is really simple:
1. Run big pipes to every home/office
2. Cap usage (not bandwidth) daily.
3. Charge users who use more (like your cellphone)
I work from home/office and need a fat pipe with big upload. Joe suburban kid wants to peer-to-peer stuff. No problem. When the traffic reaches the cap, either suspend service, or charge more for the extra traffic -- according to pre-existing arrangements. (Remember your cellphone business model?????)
I do the same for hosting now and the hosting providers seem to be happy with what they make from me. I would get the burstable traffic that I want so I can download a distro, or other large files occassionally at great speeds. Joe suburban kid can download the media that he wants from Youtube, and the ISP's can get into the business of providing all the content that they want as well.
What's wrong with that? It's capitalism, they can build out all the capacity that they want, and pass the buck onto the consumers.
But no, that's too simple for everyone to understand... What they want, is to build the big pipes and use it for their own traffic to us. Exclusively. Except that's not the way how the internet works. We want to watch Youtube or listen to iTunes or download the latest viral Lazy Sunday. They want to give us Verizon channel 5. Sure, give us Verizon channel 5, if its any good, we will watch it.
I only wish network neutrality advocates could stick to the simple position outlined above. It works for everyone. The ISP's content providers, and the consumers.
For people NOT having a vonage account and who never used vonage, this makes no sense, and they should probably be wary of phishing scam.
However, for people like myself using vonage for 2+ years now, it immediately makes sense. I registered and am now waiting for the time when I can buy my shiny new stock certificates.
Considering that the email NEVER went to the people who DO NOT use vonage, well... the aluminum foil is just seeping into your crania right about now and polluting your otherwise smoothly functioning thought process.
Programmers do algorithms, developers put something in the hands of the end-user to actually use, have fun, and make money with.
Now, most universities abroad are filled with programmers that are dying to get a job in the next Microsoft, HP, or Intel campus that opens up in their country, to sit back in a cubicle and code algos for the forseeable future. And there's a place for that, but for the money, I prefer the all-round developer any day.
26 episodes of... what's the name of the show again? Ah! Futurama!
There are some good snippets in there though, and Yahoo has done a good job of introducing code and web services to the developer community, much much more that Google has.
The design patterns are a very very good thing to expose. Although many of us might have been using similar standards, it sort of brings a number of them under one umbrella and into one place.
The strongest argument against intelligent design, is the existence of its proponents.
This just shows how far BillyG is gone off base as far as computing is concerned. He no longer thinks that having a general purpose computer is good for that part of the world.
Think how much your life as changed because of the the general purpose computer. Now think how much your life has changed because of the cell phone. Compare the two. Compare the two again, carefully.
With general purpose computers, people can produce stuff, with cell phones, they consume stuff. Its as simple as that. Which is why the Negroponte effort is so important. Because it will enable people to write programs (yes, even programs for cellphone), or a letter, or setup a database, or do spreadsheets, or help start and run their fledgling businesses. Keep credit records, get decent weather reports, create and consume rich media. The possibilities are endless with a general purpose computer.
We've become used to outrage with all that's happening in the world today -- no matter which side of the spectrum you are in, but BillyG's proposal brings to the fore a new level of outrage in me that I have not felt in a long time.
I guess you can use JSON, and XML data formats with prototype, but I just use plain old text to accomplish whatever I want.
Prototype is also used in Ruby on Rails and its PHP analogue CAKE, and also the excellent perl framework Catalyst
Compared to Google clusters, they seem to be light years behind. As a software developer, I can tell you that the key to rolling out applications quickly, is to have a decent framework in place. Whatever that framework might be (from shell scripts to java monstrosities), once its in place, developing apps on top of it are easy. Similarly a well thought out app execution environment is golden.
If you ever check out Google's MapReduce, you'll see what I mean. It's just so well thought out and so elegant, that its easy to believe that they can scale outwards forever. You'd not be too far off if you thought that Microsoft were rethinking their whole production environment to compete with Google.
There's no way that Microsoft can quickly and easily roll out vast new applications that scale, because that whole clustering framework is completely opposite to what Windows provides.
I went to the movie without any pre-conceptions and without knowing anything about AeonFlux. I've not read the comics, or anything.
I was wary going in because of bad reviews, but the movie was surprisingly, evenly good. There was a good story, and the acting was fair. Here's the main difference between AeonFlux and the Matrix, in my opionion:
Both movies start off with jaw dropping premises. AeonFlux actually carries the premise through to the end in a satisfactory conclusion.
Consumers are in two camps. Passive and Active. We're active consumers of media so its no big deal for us, but Joe six loves what Tivo and his sisters do for him. Enough six packs (about 90%) don't have PVR's and just passively consume media. This is where content producers shift eyeballs to advertisers. And the way how they get paid to produce content too. There too much politics, jobs, infrastructure and inertia piled up for an overnight shift.
Right now there ain't enough of us actives out there to pay enough for production of our favourite content by subscriptions. Believe me, I want everything that the first poster said too, but at least I am realistic in the short term.
Recipes are not copyrightable.
Windows users would sign up for droves for something like Apple's .Mac, this would have been a great way for Microsoft to get more revenue stream, offer backup services, personal home pages, file exchange, groups, and what not. Sure, Windows is crappy enough already, but a service like that, for Windows would have been a great thing. I'm sure Google will introduce it soon enough anyway.
Instead, they're in full reaction mode to Google with this really crappy site that seems to get the worst features of the web assembled all in one place.
Man, these guys have lost the ability to innovate Big Time (tm). I don't use Windows, but we all can see the opportunity that they missed here.
My eyes gravitate towards whatever article/information I'm reading and completely ignores the peripheral ads. Once in a while, I see something that I like, and if I do, I click on it.
Many slashdotters think its really kewl to block ads, but ads pay for the sites you are viewing, ads pay for slashdot (not nearly enough of us subscribe to keep this site running).
On the other hand, we do have the right to block ads, its our computer and bandwidth. But if enough of us do, then most of the sites we know and love will cease to operate. As someone working in the ad-serving and tracking industry, ad blockers (not popup blockers -- popups are evil) are beginning to show up as a serious chunk in the stats. Advertisers and their agencies are now up in arms. Not being able to tell the ROI of an ad, means agencies can't tell if its worth showing or now.
By us not clicking on the crappy flash ads -- that sends a message. Blocking it does not.